Andrew Keen

Andrew Keen is an Anglo-American entrepreneur, writer, broadcaster and public speaker. He is the author of the international hit "Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture" which has been published in 17 different languages and was short-listed for the Higham's Business Technology Book of the Year award.

As a pioneering Silicon Valley based Internet entrepreneur, Andrew founded Audiocafe.com in 1995 and built it into a popular first generation Internet music company. He is currently the host of "Keen On" show, the popular Techcrunch chat show.

Andrew is an acclaimed speaker on the international circuit, speaking regularly on the impact of new technology on 21st century business, education and society. Andrew's new book about the social media revolution,Digital Vertigo will be published by St Martin's Press in 2012.

Latest from Andrew Keen

Appropriately, Bruce Sterling closed SXSW this year. It’s appropriate because after Bruce, there really isn’t much to say. He’s just about the smartest and funniest historical science fictional writer in the business. And the edgiest too – even though he’s built a professorial façade to disguise the punk in him.
So it was a huge honor to catch the darkly… Read More

One of the most eagerly awaited movies debuting at SXSW this year is the Swedish production Press, Pause, Play. It’s an examination of both the benefits and the downside of the democratizing power of the Internet, featuring interviews with Seth Godin, Scott Belsky, Sean Parker, Moby and (blush) myself.
Press, Pause, Play got its world premiere on Friday night in Austin and yesterday I… Read More

Is gaming like religion – a way of taking our minds off reality and indulging in unrealizable fantasies?
Not according to Jane McGonigal, one of electronic gaming’s most articulate evangelists. According to McGonigal, gaming is real rather than a fantasy and it not only makes us better people but also improves the world. Indeed, McGonigal even suggests that we might need a 21st… Read More

Yes, it is. At least according to gaming guru, Jane McGonigal, the author of the hit new book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. For McGonigal, who began gaming as a ten-year-old and is now Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, reality needs to be refashioned as a game in order to build our self-confidence and… Read More

Yesterday, movie, music and sports mogul Peter Guber told me why there’s no business without story business. In the instant best-selling Tell To Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story, his new book released today, Guber urges everyone to unleash the power of story.
Today, Guber’s attention shifts from the power of storytelling to the future of the… Read More

“I was born curious,” Peter Guber confessed to me when he came into the TechCrunch studio earlier this month. We should all be so curious. The legendary Guber – whose list of accomplishments as a superstar Hollywood producer (Rain Man, Batman, Midnight Express, Flashdance etc.), broadcaster, university professor, best-selling writer, new media mogul (board member of Demand… Read More

In mid February, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt expressed pride in Google employee Wael Ghonim’s brave struggle against the autocratic Mubarak regime to establish political transparency in Egypt. “We are very, very proud of what Wael and that group was able to do in Egypt,” Schmidt said in Barcelona. But what Schmidt needs… Read More

Meet the man who killed the television industry. In the mid Nineties, while he was looking at a Fry’s ad, Anthony Wood invented the personal video recorder (PVR). From this epiphany, Wood founded ReplayTV in 1997, a PVR company which, for a short while, gave TiVO a run for its money.
But Wood not only invented the PVR, he also helped kill it. In 2002, after leaving ReplayTV, Wood… Read More

While yesterday’s interview with MIT’s Sherry Turkle focused on the arrival of the Robotic Moment, today’s is about Turkle’s pessimistic view of social media. In today’s age of the social, we are all becoming adolescents, she told me when she came into our San Francisco studio earlier this month. “Just because we grew up with the Internet doesn’t mean… Read More

Once a cheerleader of the Internet revolution, Sherry Turkle, the Director of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self, has become deeply pessimistic about our digital future. In her controversial new book, Alone Together, Turkle argues that the development of emotionally sympathetic robots like Tamagotchis and Furbies means that the “robotic moment” has arrived for the… Read More

Over the last fifteen years, innovation maven Seth Godin has written twelve best-selling books about breaking all the traditional rules in business. But Godin’s thirteenth book, a little thing about initiative which will be published next month, threatens to be the biggest rule-breaker in his destructive career.
Godin’s thirteenth book may well be unlucky for the traditional… Read More

As the author of twelve best-selling books including his latest 2010 hit Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? and the iconic Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable, Seth Godin is amongst the most sought-after business visionaries in the world.
“So why are you so popular?” I asked Godin when we met in New York late last month.
“I notice things,” he… Read More

Why haven’t American technology journalists reported the truth about the working conditions at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China – a 430,000 person factory that manufactures around 50% of all the personal communications devices used in America? Why aren’t they doing their job?
According to the monologist Mike Daisey, it’s not only journalists who have missed the… Read More

Last I night I had the good fortune to see Mike Daisey’s highly acclaimed show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. It’s both an entertaining and acutely moving performance that anyone who owns an Apple product has a moral duty to see.
Daisey is not only a brilliant monologist in the tradition of Michael Moore and Spalding Gray, but he’s… Read More

With billions of dollars flowing into today’s social economy, betaworks CEO John Borthwick sees the social economy radically changing not only media, but all 21st century industries. It’s 1998 all over again, he told me when we met last week in New York City – thus arguing that today’s social boom still has at least a couple of years of innovation left in it.
But… Read More

As the CEO of betaworks, John Borthwick is one of the most influential architects of the social web. Borthwick, who used to run technology strategy at Time Warner, co-founded betaworks as a new medium company for the social economy. Today, betaworks is a network of around 30 companies – including Bitly, Tweetdeck, Chartbeat and SocialFlow – all, in Borthwick’s words… Read More

In his important new book, What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly – the legendary Silicon Valley provocateur and Wired magazine’s Senior Maverick – introduces technology as a thing with needs, wants and appetites. What Kelly thinks of as “technology” might not quite be God, but it’s something that reflects the laws of the universe and is thus central to our… Read More

As Silicon Valley legends go, Kevin Kelly is up there with John Perry Barlow, Woz, Stewart Brand, Steve Jobs and a select group of dreamers, troublemakers and lunatics who invented the future that we at TechCrunch now cover every day. The publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review between 1984 and 1990, the co-founder of the Hacker Conference, one of the founders of the Well in 1995… Read More

What should be the role of the Internet in US foreign policy? Should we be encouraging Twitter and Facebook to overthrow the governments in Iran, China and Russia? Is the Internet the United States’ best weapon against authoritarianism?
According to Stanford University visiting fellow Evgeny Morozov, the United States government is suffering from what he calls the “net… Read More

2011 is only five days old, but already we’ve got some pretty scary predictions for our infant new year. According to Techcrunch technology reporter, Alexia Tsotsis, several things about 2011 keep her up at night including:
– The US selling off Groupon to pay the national debt.
– A huge government leak of information.
– Facebook to IPO and thus change the world.
In… Read More